I quit watching the Super Bowl telecast tonight, strange behavior for a person who has been immersed in sports for many years, attending at least 15 different national sports championship events.
I teach about sports, I write about sports, and long ago I was a sports reporter. I think I had watched every Super Bowl game on television, from even before they were called Super Bowls. But something happened in the first quarter of the telecast tonight that infuriated me so much I turned off the television and stopped watching.
The NFL was patting itself on the back by doing the usual “Martin Luther King” tour and then talking about racial justice. Puh-leeze!
After NFL owners blackballed Colin Kaepernick for leading the kneeling protests against police brutality and general injustice against African Americans, many blacks decided to boycott the NFL—by not going to games and not even watching on television.
I no longer go to NFL games, but I joined some of this action by not watching any regular season NFL games in 2017 or 2018. In 2018 I watched three post-season games, the NFC and AFC Championship games, and the Super Bowl with the two winners. I was on the way to repeating that pattern when tonight happened.
I was already feeling a little guilty as I sat to watch the Super Bowl, thinking about some of the African American artists who declined the invitation to perform at the Super Bowl, expressing solidarity with Kaepernick—Rihanna, Jay Zee, and Cardi B.
So what do Commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL do? They bring out Atlanta icons of civil rights in Congressman John Lewis and Ambassador Andrew Young, and they wrap themselves in the blanket of Martin Luther King’s words and history as if they are of one accord with it.
It’s ironic that the expressed main function of the King Center was to offer training in nonviolent protests against racial injustice (something they do not appear to have done), yet Bernice King let herself be used in an attempt to whitewash the NFL which blackballed a player for doing precisely that–committing respectful, nonviolent protests.